Conjure Elemental is a lost spell, requiring 320 magic investment on your first magic to use, the highest of any current spell in the game. However, despite this, the spell feels.. kind of underwhelming? I know we only have 3 lost spells but one of them is a decent team support one and the other is an insanely good attack. Conjure elemental, despite having more magic invest than any other spell, seems to just suck in my opinion. The summon doesn’t do much damage, half the time doesn’t aggro unless they’re hit first, and dies almost immediately. This does not feel like a lost spell.
Therefore, my suggestion is, the Elemental creates nearly identical clone(s) of the user except in elemental form. The clone(s) would get better following ai, and instead of acting as individual npcs who occasionally fire an 80 damage blast, they instead will mirror everything the user does. If the user uses annihilation, so will the clone(s), at the same time. Damage would scale with how many clones there are, 1 being 50% of the original spell (basically acting like a 1.5x multiplier), 2 being 30% (if both land, 1.6x multiplier), 3 being 25% (1.75x), and 4, the max, being 20%, dealing 1.8x of the spells damage if every hit lands. The health would scale how it does already or it can be changed so they’re 1 tapped by any attack so they act as insane power boosts but can easily be dismantled. This could also lead to funny moments like imagine having 4 clones and they all use barrage, so you just nuke someone.
Not sure if this is balanced, or if there should be changes (like only base spells, no rare/lost, lore reasoning could be they weren’t made with enough energy to use said spells, maybe ultimate art conjure elementals will be able to use rare spells at most), but i feel like this would be way better than the current state of this supposed “lost” tier spell. (Also I feel like the same should apply to the spirit clone rite, and if any fighting style gets a gimmick where the user can make a clone then it should apply to them as well)
You do realize mages nowadays use next to no base spells, right? This change makes them outright useless to the average mage. Nowadays, they’re at least a nice passive source of damage and a distraction for enemies. I, for example, use only beam and leap on both my magics.
they can use base spells that are similar in function to the spell the mage used, so like if they used quake the clone could use explosion, if they used annihilation the clone could use blast or maybe even hasta if its ultimate art and can use rares
plus, at the moment, they are actively useless to the average mage, everytime i use my conjure elemental it ends up doing next to nothing because its a poorly designed spell (not just because it has bad scaling, but also because it just doesnt even aggro sometimes)
the person i met in area watching as their screen goes blank with blinding blood disease, blinding gel, crystal orb-imbued x80 count light barrage with 4 of my clones also firing:
i will say conjure elemental is good at distracting enemies and applying/refreshing debuffs (such as blinds and DoT) so it does have some utility with certain magics
i feel like the issue lies in the nonexistent stat scaling[1] (resulting in homeless levels of damage) and long cooldown which both make it end up really disappointing, especially when, like you said, they die really quickly and then you basically have to wait for the next AO content update to resummon them
also just in case u didn’t know, the elementals aggro onto the first enemy u hit after summoning them
conjure elemental does at least scale with haste, but 874 haste reduces its cooldown by <10s. mind you bteam saw this and wanted to reduce the haste efficiency even further ↩︎
also they get stuck on the most nonexistant boundaries when i summon them
should be good on every magic, but sadly it isnt, sure stat scaling would make it at least viable but (and maybe im a bit biased) i think my idea, if properly balanced, would be far cooler
this might just be me but i personally think it’s okay for certain spells to pair better with certain magics (like how multi-hit or fast spells pair well with magics like light), but not be straight up completely unusable/horrible for everything else (and conjure elementals is kind of close to that point)
i also rlly like ur idea, but i think it should be its own lost/ancient spell rather than a rework
I understand that Conjure Elementals might feel underwhelming currently, but that does not mean they aren’t strong. They’re already extremely good in PVP as it is free value, and in PVE it finds its own value in pretty much being aggro takers, with supplemental statuses and damage. Adding anything to them that makes them more controllable and pretty much direct multiplicative power boosters would just be ridiculously strong.
I get why you want this, but it just creates a large disparity between mage and other classes, as well as being unhealthy to fight in general. We (Balance team) had some ideas to change conjure elementals to be less… existing and more active (primarily in the form of incentivizing more aggressive gameplay while they’re active, but this is primarily in pvp only)? But there aren’t any plans to change them currently past the existing CD nerf it got, if you have ideas that would be… more reasonable power-wise, I could push them through.
The only real way I could see salvaging this suggestion to be more balanced is to make the damage the clones take also be applied to the user in some form, but then it just becomes a chosen glass cannon form vs. mandated glass cannon (since you’re now being shot by 2-5 spells at once). Sooooo :shrug:
i had a few ideas of ways to balance it (and yeah i may of went overboard with the multipliers), but i think if it got some stat scaling like everyone else was saying it’d just be fine (also with better pathfinding ai), though im not sure how that would affect pvp
Stat scaling wouldn’t be a bad idea, but we would have to scale back Conjure Elemental’s power or cost before we could consider putting it in as balance, pathfinding AI probably isn’t something we can really suggest to just “improve it”.
